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by ufmace 1865 days ago
Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it took me over an hour of fiddling with various formatting boxes to figure out how to turn it off. Any word processor that doesn't have the capability to do that has some appeal to me.
2 comments

I haven't seen a word processing document in a professional setting for many years now (didn't realize it until just now). Who uses a word processor these days? Writers certainly don't use that garbage.

I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.

> Writers certainly don’t use that garbage.

I hate to inform you that, yes, writers do indeed use “that garbage”. I’m married to an author who regularly uses Scrivener to write. But anytime she has to send anything to anyone she has to convert to a Word document and send that out. Everyone uses Word that she interacts with. (Though author friends of hers might also use Scrivener for their writing)

Writers who understand git, let alone Markdown, are going to be extremely rare. You’re in a bubble if you haven’t encountered how dependent the writing field is on Word documents.

Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.